"Please, Gideon, if it won't be troubling you, I should like to speak to you about my affairs. I am very hard up, in fact, and fellows are being rather beastly about money I owe them."
"I'm afraid I can't finance you, Bannister," said Gideon awfully kindly. "My money's all out at interest just now, and, as a matter of fact, I'm rather funky about some of it."
"I don't want you to finance me," I said; "and that would be jolly poor fun for you anyway, because I've got nothing, and never shall have in this world, as far as I can see. I only want you to advise me. I'm fourteen and three-quarters, and when I was twelve and a half my father got into pretty much the same mess that I'm in now; and he got out again with ease, and even had champagne afterwards, by the simple plan of being bankrupt."
"It's not always an honourable thing—I warn you of that," said Gideon.
"I'm sure it was perfectly honourable in my father's case," I said, "because he's a frightfully honourable man. And I am honourable, too, and want to do what is right and proper as soon as possible."
"Why don't you write to your father?" asked Gideon.
"Because he once warned me—when he was being bankrupted, in fact—that if ever I owed any man a farthing he would break my neck, and my mother said at the same time—blubbing into a handkerchief as she said it—that she would rather see me in my coffin than in the bankruptcy court. All the same, they both cheered up like anything after it was all over, and father said he should not hesitate to go through it all again if necessary; but, still, I wouldn't for the world tell them what I've done. In fact, they think that I have money in hand and subscribe to the chapel offertories, and do all sorts of good with my ten bob a term; whereas the truth is that I have to pay it all away instantly on the first day of the term, and have had to ever since two terms after I first came."
"What you must do, then, is to go bankrupt," said Gideon thoughtfully.
"Yes," I said, "that's just the whole thing. How do you begin?"
"Generally other people begin," said Gideon. "Creditors, as a rule, do what they think will pay them best. Sometimes they will show great patience, if they think it is worth while, and sometimes they won't. My father has told me about these things. He has had to bankrupt a few people in his time, though he's always very sorry to do it."